Announced in January, Vuforia is the new name of Qualcomm’s Augmented Reality platform. Qualcomm has just announced the commercial release of Vuforia SDK 1.5 for Android and iOS.

Applications built using this SDK can now be distributed and promoted on the Android Market and Apple App Store. Developers can also build 3D AR application using Qualcomm’s extension for the Unity 3 cross-platform game engine.

Ability to swap datasets at runtime: You no longer have to upgrade your app to change the target dataset, and you can now build AR experiences that work on a large number of images. If your app needs to augment more than 60 images, you can now create multiple datasets using the web-based Target Management System (My Trackables tool) and load the appropriate dataset at runtime.

Video background texture access: The new SDK now provides a simple and streamlined way of accessing the video background texture. Developers can now write custom special effects using powerful shaders resulting in far more exciting application experiences.

Improved tracking performance: The new SDK also features several enhancements that reduce jitter in the augmentations, speed up recovery from tracking failures, detect targets at steeper angles and track over longer distances. FrameMarkers can now be partially occluded – allowing them to be picked up and used as game pieces within the AR experience.

Watch the video below to see a comparison between Qualcomm AR SDK 1.0 and SDK 1.5.

Vuforia SDK 1.5 can be downloaded free of charge for Windows, Mac and Linux, and Unity 3D extension is available for Windows and Mac only.